Your Christmas Shopping Would Never Be The Same

How were your shopping experiences this holiday season - maybe less than ideal? It's likely that your less-than-ideal experiences were due in part to a lack of company-generated employee-customer initiatives. Most employees come to work each day wanting to perform their jobs properly. However, organizations have a tendency to put barriers in place in the form of policies, processes & incentives that limit employees' abilities to meet customers' needs.

Many organizations conduct customer satisfaction & employee engagement surveys but fail to connect & fully utilize the potential of these metrics. As a result, there is not alignment between the behavior that customers want from employees & the behavior that organizations encourage. Correlating customers' & employees' needs should be a key element of every leader's responsibilities.

The most successful organizations create logistical & emotional connections between their employees & their customers. They identify the company initiatives that impact employee behavior & insure that these initiatives enable & motivate employees to provide products & services that are customer-focused. These organizations do so by plotting customer cycles of service & the touch points within & optimizing each to encourage customer repeat buying behavior.

Your organization's success is determined by behavior: the behavior of your customers which you can't control & the behavior of your employees which you can control or, at least, significantly influence. For example, organizations of all sizes have, at a minimum, some form of interviewing, orientation, performance management & compensation processes. But many times we find these processes are not only not enabling customer-focused employee behavior but discouraging those behaviors.

Disney, L.L. Bean, Nordstrom, Ritz-Carlton & Fed Ex have identified the employee competencies & behaviors that they & their customers most desire. And they focus those behaviors toward the customer through their HR processes because there is a causal relationship between properly designed/effectively implemented HR processes & increases in sales, profits & market value. These HR processes provide management with the capability to achieve strategic & operational goals while developing the workforce into a source of sustainable competitive advantage. Theses organizations leverage their HR processes as follows:

• Interviewing & Selection Process: conducting behavior-based interviews to ascertain how applicants have handled similar, past interactions with customers
• New Employee Orientation: new hires leave extensive orientation sessions with a clear understanding of the organization's expectations of them
• Job Descriptions & Standards of Performance: spell out job expectations & the specific steps that should be followed in satisfying those expectations  
• Performance Management: appraisal forms & feedback focus exclusively on priority competencies & behaviors
• Monetary Rewards: the employees who deliver the performance expected make significantly more money than those who don't 
• Nonmonetary Recognition: multiple forms of recognition are continually given to communicate & recognize the behavior the organization wants repeated
• Training & Development: training dollars are only expended to improve employees' abilities related to the identified, priority competencies
• Daily Coaching: managers are held accountable for constantly coaching employees to improve on those desired competencies

No doubt we would enjoy our shopping experiences more if organizations followed the above practices. And the organizations would be able to sell more of their products at the full price-point. The success achieved by Disney, L.L. Bean, Nordstrom, Ritz-Carlton & Fed Ex is not an accident. Walt Disney said "there's no magic in the Magic Kingdom, it involves managing a lot of details".

The best predictor of your organization's future success is your customers' perception of the quality of your products & services - as compared to your competitors. And the quality of your products & your service is in the hands of your employees.

Merry Christmas to you & your family. Because of you, 2012 was a very successful year for The Focus Group. Thank you for all of your support & opportunities in 2012. We very much look forward to assisting you in 2013.